Former Prisoners Are Leading the Fight Against Mass Incarceration

Tina Glasgow will never forget one letter she received from her son, Kenny, when he was in an Alabama prison. It was 1994, the year of the crime bill, and Democrats and Republicans were outdoing each other to prove how harshly they could punish people like him. Kenny had started getting arrested for drugs when he was 14. “After he sealed the envelope, he marked it and said, ‘Do not open this envelope until I come home,’” she said. “He didn’t come home until 2001.” When Glasgow and her son finally opened the letter, it contained a “vision,” a plan to “clean up what he messed up.” But it was more than that. Kenny wanted to help the people he’d left behind, to show them that they had value and a role to play in society.

Today, Kenny is known as Pastor Kenneth Glasgow, the man behind The Ordinary People’s Movement (TOPS), in Dothan, Alabama. It is “an oasis,” as described by the writer and Drug Policy Alliance activist asha bandele; a place where community members and the formerly incarcerated come for housing and sustenance — not to mention the grassroots headquarters for “some of the most far-reaching drug policy and criminal justice changes in Alabama.” It’s because of Glasgow that state officials have been recently forced to follow the law where voting rights are concerned. For years, it was widely assumed that anyone convicted of a felony in Alabama lost the right to cast a ballot, at least until being released from prison. In reality, the law was narrower than that — only convictions “involving moral turpitude” could disqualify people from voting, yet the state didn’t bother to define which crimes fell into the category. Unbeknownst to them, thousands of incarcerated Alabamans still had the right to vote. “This is an issue that’s never come up before,” the state commissioner of corrections told the New York Times in a 2008 story on Glasgow. “I would think that if there were any latent feeling out there that they wanted to vote, they would have expressed it by now.”

Pastor Kenneth Glasgow speaks during the inaugural national conference of the Formerly Incarcerated and Convicted People and Families Movement (FICPFM) on September 9, 2016 in Oakland, California.

Photo: Kenneth Glasgow

Glasgow was one of roughly 500 people who convened in Oakland, California, last weekend for the first national conference of the Formerly Incarcerated, Convicted People, and Families Movement. Hailing from more than 30 states, it was a shared fact of life among participants that the change they need — including fundamental civil rights — will not simply be handed to them by people in power. They must fight for it themselves. This is the founding logic of FICPFM, led by a network of grassroots activists from across the country who have been beating back the tentacles of mass incarceration for years. With the national consciousness shifting around criminal justice reform — and the 1994 crime bill now acknowledged by the Clintons themselves to have gone too far — the FICPFM convention was a powerful testament to those who have been doing such work because their very lives depended on it, not because the political landscape suddenly allowed it.

The conference took place at the Oakland Airport Hilton, kicking off with a jubilant tribute to the founders of the FICPFM. Central among them was the “godfather of our movement,” Dorsey Nunn, co-founder of the California-based group All of Us or None. In 2011, Nunn joined Pastor Glasgow and others in Selma, Alabama, marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge under the banner of the Formerly Incarcerated People’s Movement. Once serving a life sentence in California, Nunn is now widely recognized for his decades of activist work; he coined the term “Ban the Box,” a campaign to abolish barriers to employment for people with a criminal record, an idea embraced last year by Barack Obama. Last year, Nunn received a Champion of Change award from the White House.

The love for Nunn was palpable. “Dorsey! Dorsey! Dorsey!” the audience shouted during the opening plenary; an emotional Glasgow vowed never to let his name die. Glasgow also gave a special shout-out to his mother in the audience, affectionately known as Mama Tina, thanking her for supporting him throughout his incarceration, including even when she was forced to pawn her belongings to make ends meet. A standing ovation brought tears to her eyes. “I couldn’t help but cry when he was speaking,” she told me afterward. “Because I did not expect all of that back when I was praying for God to change his life.” Today, she urges people with a loved one in prison, “Don’t give up on them. A lot of people give up on them — especially if they commit a lot of crimes or have long sentences. Don’t ever give up on them. Because you never know what God’s gonna do.”

Tina is heartened by the recent embrace of criminal justice reform among mainstream politicians. But she is clear that it would never have happened without the work of those like Nunn and her own son, who fought for years before anyone in power listened. “I am 70 years old,” she says. “It should have been this way all the time.”

Not Just Another Nonprofit

At a time when genteel, bipartisan criminal justice-themed summits seem to take place every day, the gathering in Oakland was decidedly militant by comparison. (“Building a Movement, Not Just Another Nonprofit,” read the slogan on pamphlets for All of Us or None.) Speakers identified themselves as prison abolitionists and anti-capitalists, many calling one another “comrade.” Coinciding with the 45th anniversary of the Attica uprising in New York — as well as a planned nationwide prison strike — a panel on September 9 focused on political prisoners, featuring people like Sekou Odinga, a Black Panther and member of the Black Liberation Army who helped break Assata Shakur from prison, later spending 30 years behind bars. It also included a powerful appearance by Angola 3 member Albert Woodfox, released in February of this year after surviving more than 43 years in solitary confinement, who began by saying, “All power to the people.” For their extraordinary biographies, however, panelists encouraged participants to broaden their idea of what constitutes a political prisoner. “When we’re sitting here in 2016 talking about our rights, that we are being denied the right to vote for political reasons, that you’re being [denied parole] for political reasons,” one speaker said, then what are you? “If we had the right to vote, imagine the political impact.”

[photo align='none' width='auto' credit='Photo: Scott Braley']

Younger attendees, many incarcerated themselves or children of current or formerly incarcerated parents, offer their perspectives during a panel discussion on September 9, 2016 in Oakland, California.

Photo: Scott Braley

In the room was a mix of young and old; veteran organizers and those finding their footing in activism. Twenty-five-year-old Robert Jones, who left prison in California just over a year ago, called himself a “third-generation convict” — his grandfather cycled in and out of prison and his dad “caught his first felony when he was 10,” he told me. After being homeless for a time, he’s back in school and still looking for the best way to break the cycle he was born into. For all the talk of voting rights, Jones said he recently quit his job with a get-out-the-vote group, largely out of frustration. “I would go to the local Walmart and I’m talking to people, and half the people I’m talking to in the parking lot are either on parole themselves — they can’t vote — they’re undocumented, or they’re strung out,” he said. “You talk to them about voting and they’re like, ‘What the fuck? That’s not gonna help me right now. I don’t have time for this. I got three kids I have to pick up, rent’s due — sorry, bye.’” Another young man, a founding member of the Black Lives Matter chapter in Long Beach, said he had recently been arrested at a protest; he wanted advice from the political prisoners on how to protect his generation of organizers, when “in the media they’re calling activists terrorists.”

The speakers weren’t the only ones with deep radical roots. An older woman named Sister Sheba knitted quietly throughout the panel, occasionally nodding in agreement. Later she told me she had been in prison herself, under the name Claudia Grayson, after operating the George Jackson People’s Free Health Clinic in Berkeley as a lieutenant in the Black Panther Party. Her daughter, now in her 40s, is named Attica. “I was like five months pregnant when I heard about the rebellion at Attica,” she recalled. “My daughter kicked the mess out of me and I was like, ‘OK, that’s your name!’”

Like many at the conference, Sister Sheba was magnanimous about the more mainstream energy rising up around criminal justice reform. “There’s always been more than one track in terms of fighting oppression,” she said, adding that it often comes down to people’s economic background. “You do need educated people who know the law to counteract the unfair laws,” she said. At the same time, you also need more confrontational activists, those who will say to people in power, “You can make a deal with us or you can make a deal with them — but you’re gonna deal with somebody.”

Mixed Messages From the Obama Administration

It is emblematic of the power within the FICPFM that the Obama administration now finds itself dealing with so many of its members. In 2014, Pastor Glasgow, Dorsey Nunn, and six other formerly incarcerated activists who were present in Oakland last weekend — Daryl Atkinson, Susan Burton, Norris Henderson, Manuel LaFontaine, Glenn Martin, and Vivian Nixon — were invited to meet with senior staff to discuss the needs of people coming home from prison. Officially known as the Federal Interagency Reentry Council, its members sought their input as they laid their goals and strategies. As Pastor Glasgow told the crowd, “something transformed” that day. “In that meeting they didn’t see ex-felons no more. In that meeting they seen people who have been incarcerated. Experts by experience. Serving our country after serving our time.”

Such encounters have not all been smooth sailing — last year, Glenn Martin, founder of JustLeadershipUSA, wrote an open letter to President Obama describing the humiliation of having arrived at the White House after being invited for a policy discussion, only to be told by security that he needed a special escort. On stage, Martin said he had been encouraged by the response from the White House, which appeared to take his letter seriously. In particular, he lauded Assistant Attorney General Karol Mason — perhaps the most surprising speaker to appear in Oakland — for her work at the Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs to advance among her colleagues the “moral argument for why they needed to be more courageous before this administration ended.” In a Q&A with Martin, Mason described the work being done by the Reentry Council and others within the Obama administration, for example, a pilot program restoring Pell Grants to people in prison.

Mason, who worked in private practice in Atlanta for more than 25 years — she was the first black woman to make partner at her firm — worked to establish common ground with the crowd. She said she has cousins who have done time and referred to Nunn and his cohort as friends. But there were inevitable disconnects. A reference she made to the Broadway musical “Hamilton” fell flat — predictable in a room where many people needed financial assistance to make the trip. Concerns she expressed about “collateral consequences” clashed with the wider contention — often heard among radical activists — that the system is not “broken” but operating exactly as designed, marginalizing poor people and people of color. And as Mason described efforts by the Federal Bureau of Prisons to let people with children “still be parents when they’re incarcerated,” one woman yelled, “Don’t send them to prison!,” eliciting cheers.

Dorsey Nunn, executive director of Legal Services for Prisoners with Children (LSPC), speaks during the inaugural national conference of the Formerly Incarcerated and Convicted People and Families Movement (FICPFM) on September 9, 2016 in Oakland, California.

Photo: Scott Braley

There was plenty of awareness in Oakland that the Obama administration has been no model for human rights — from its deportation record to the treatment of Chelsea Manning, who was beginning a hunger strike as Mason addressed the audience in Oakland. At the same time, between the president’s historic visit to a federal prison to his ongoing clemency initiative, many criminal justice activists could not have imagined such moves from the White House just a few years ago. Certainly, Mason’s individual efforts at the DOJ suggest a personal commitment to the cause; it was she who directed her office earlier this year to stop using dehumanizing language like “felon,” “convict,” or “offender”; in the Washington Post, she described them as “useless and demeaning labels that freeze people in a single moment of time.” Such moves might seem purely symbolic or superficial, especially compared to concrete policy changes, but for groups like All of Us or None, language is a prime concern. Participants in Oakland repeatedly invoked the need to reject the well-meaning progressive term “returning citizen” for people who leave prison, since it erases the criminalization of noncitizens and undocumented people. The name “All of Us or None,” after all, is itself a commitment to leaving no one behind, to abolishing the misleading distinctions between “violent offenders” and “nonviolent offenders,” for example. It also means sticking up for the so-called “undeserving,” as one panel put it. “My son may not be going to get Skittles and iced tea,” Nunn said, invoking Trayvon Martin. “My son could be going to get a beer and a blunt — and he should still have the ability to make it home.”

In a sense, even Mason’s directive at the DOJ can be traced back to Attica, where the famed rallying cry was “We are MEN.” It was veteran activist Eddie Ellis, who was there in 1971 when the men inside the prison rose up, who decades later wrote an open letter rejecting labels like “felon” or “convict” and asking that society “simply refer to us as PEOPLE.” Ellis died in 2014; his named was invoked repeatedly in Oakland. As the conference came to a close, Glenn Martin described how he and the FICPFM stood on the shoulders of leaders like Ellis, who “had a vision for this and much more. Here it is, years later and he’s not here to see that.” To Martin, the gathering in Oakland is a pivotal moment for a movement that will continue to build no matter who is in the White House next year. As they showed the Obama administration during that critical meeting in 2014, “We didn’t need people to organize us, we needed resources. We were already organized.”

Top photo: Cisco Torres, Dr. Robert King, and Sekou Odinga share their experiences of incarceration during a panel discussion on September 9, 2016 in Oakland, California.

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More people need to take criminal justice reform seriously, not just ex-felons who have an understanding of this very broken system. Mass Incarceration is taking its toll on us all. Changes need to be made at not only the federal level but at the state level too. Mass incarceration has also taken its toll on our country’s morale as well. It isn’t just about the person in prison — it is also about their families — their parents, their children, their spouses, their siblings, their friends, etc. It is time we treat people incarcerated humanely — they are our people — Americans. We need to address the underlying issues that lead to incarceration such as mental illness, addiction and poverty. Our leaders need to not only address federal criminal justice reform, but they need to return to their states and also implement criminal justice reforms there. Let me give you just one example…Lenny Singleton.

Lenny committed a series of “grab & dash” robberies in one week while high on alcohol and crack to fund his addiction. He robbed a total of less than $550 and no one was murdered or even physically injured. No one claimed to be a “victim.” He did not have a gun. He was a first time felon with a college degree who served in our Navy before his addiction. The judge, without any explanation to Lenny or the courtroom, sentenced him to more time than rapists, child molesters, and murderers. Lenny received 2 Life Sentences plus 100 years. He is sentenced to die in prison while murderers and child molesters will walk free.

Lenny has been in prison for over 21 years now. He works every business day, lives in the Honor’s Dorm, and takes every available class for self-improvement. During his entire time in prison he has never been in trouble for anything – very rare for lifers. In his spare time, he has co-authored a book to help others headed down the same path called, “Love Conquers All,” now available on Amazon.

To keep Lenny incarcerated for the rest of his life will cost taxpayers well over a million dollars — for robbing less than $550 in crimes where no one was physically injured — this makes absolutely no sense. That money would be better spent on rehabilitation services, preventative education or rebuilding infrastructures — on anything other than keeping one man, who has served 21 years already, who didn’t injure anyone, who has a college degree locked up for the rest of his life. Lenny deserves to be given a second chance. When you multiply Lenny’s case by the literally thousands of cases similar to his, you begin to grasp the magnitude of the problem. And this is just addressing the monetary issue.

Lenny’s case is possibly one of the worst cases in the country illustrating sentencing disparity. In fact it was so horrid that his story ran on the front page of The NY Times on July 4th, 2016, http://nyti.ms/29ik8sY and was picked up by AlterNet, http://www.alternet.org/…/ther… It is time everyone take criminal justice reform seriously.

Please learn more & sign Lenny Singleton’s petition at http://www.justice4lenny.org. Justice will not have been served if Lenny dies in prison.

I’ve read of many different countries where a party or faction has boycotted an election. But can you think of one where that ever actually worked?

You don’t legitimize a crooked government when you cast your vote – you legitimize them when you hand over your cash. So unless you have an AK-47 and a rebel base in the mountains, don’t tell me you’re sticking it to the man by not voting when you’ll be doing whatever the fuck he says later on.

I don’t know why people look at Trump in an unfavorable way when there are people like the Clintons walking around. It’s rumored that Mena Arkansas was instrumental in the supposed increase in gang related crimes in the years Bill was Arkansa’s Governor. The increase in crime numbers were generated by the increased numbers of personnel used to fight the war on drugs. There is a direct relationship to crime numbers and the numbers of law enforcement personnel creating the crime numbers. But, I’ll concede for arguments sake that Bill was right, there was a significant increase in crime in the years he was Governor into his Presidency. The turd was involved in the cocaine that was the root of the criminal activities…. How? What the? Is he?
Bill Says the Crime Bill went too far? That’s it, that’s all he’ll say?……….
Hillary would be more anti crime. She would put another million or two behind bars.

How can anyone support the Clintons? They would help a person drowning in their pool by throwing a boulder to help them die faster.

People look at Trump negatively because, despite the dog and pony show, he’s still surrounded by all the usual Republican crooks and liars. The difference between Bush and Obama is that with Obama people hoped for reform, and got a few scraps … with Bush, they just waited for him to shovel more money to his banker and warmonger buddies and end up blowing $5 trillion plus on the rich. It may not be all the difference we want but it’s a difference.

And when you look at Republicans in office — if they were honest they would make them all wear some dippy outfit like a paper crown or a chicken hat, to remind people they are just pawns. Democrats have opinions, differ with each other, 60 Democrats is rarely a majority even on the most important issue. But just 40 Republicans will stand there chanting their party line FOREVER, never deviating, never considering anyone else’s opinion, never saying anything that wasn’t written on the piece of paper they were handed, and they’ll cheerfully shut down the whole government or let kids all over America be born with shrunken heads or leave New Orleans to crumble into the sea if there is one damn dollar they can extract out of the hands of some poor person and give to an heiress to inflate her fortune.

There is contemptible in the sense of ordinary people and contemptible in the sense of Republican demagogues and tyrants and criminals, and they’re two whole different kinds of contemptible.

It’s not that simple really. The Senate is 100% partisan. The House is not because they are not there for 20 years at a time. The two parties are basically corporations with the same problems any corporation has.

I find your criticism of Republicans one sided. The Democrats have all kinds of special interests. You refer to failed funding bills for Zika, New Orleans, and the like as a failure on their part. I hate to be the one to tell you, but those bills, like most were written by lobbyists with an agenda. They were probably thousands of pages long, with no money allocated to fund themselves, as well as including things completely unrelated that the Democrats want. So any intelligent person would vote against them on their merits. And when that happens, Democrats shout “they don’t care about Zika!, etc.” So for them it’s a win-win. It’s politics, and I see they have fooled you.